It’s a fact that most businesses use some type of CRM software in 2021 to help them manage their customer relationships.

Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) are designed to help cultivate your relationships with customers in a time-effective way. 

Still, you might as well be developing relationships without a management system if your CRM’s interface is unintuitive and slow.

Time equals money, especially for businesses. Companies, big or small, rely on well-utilized time and customers to reach their financial goals, so they can’t afford to waste time reorganizing their systems every time something slips up.

Not sure if your business even needs a CRM? Click here to learn why this technology is vital before we get started.

If you’ve found that your CRM is taking more effort to upkeep than it’s worth, it may be time to take advantage of these time-saving practices:

A CRM is meant to save you time, not dominate it. So if your business is tired of wasting precious time that could be used to acquire new customers and boost your revenue, then let’s jump straight into it!

Secure your data with authentication

Before you decide on any desired features in your next CRM, you’ll want to ensure your system offers some authentication. 

The usability and functionality of your system mean nothing if there’s a data breach, exposing your customers’ information to the world.

Potential customers won’t want to invest in your products or even share their personal information if they feel like it might end up in the wrong hands. And if it does end up in the wrong hands, you’ll have customers and other businesses disassociating themselves with your company left and right.

Implementing a user authentication tool is a quick way to protect all of your contacts’ information, such as:

• Their name
• Their address
• Their payment information

If you want to speed up the authentication process, even more, try using a passwordless authentication tool. 

With passwordless authentication, users will tap a button that creates an automated email containing an encrypted key code instead of entering traditional login credentials (i.e. a username and password) with passwordless authentication. 

Once they hit send, their code will be processed, and they’ll be automatically logged in. This ensures that only authorized users can access your CRM data. 

All the data you gather won’t do you any good if it’s not protected from unauthorized users. By protecting your data, you’ll prevent data breaches that can take up irreplaceable time to resolve. 

Choose a system that has a simple interface.

After security, a simple interface is the main feature you should look for in a CRM. It should be straightforward to navigate. You don’t want your employees fumbling around trying to get the tools and information they need. 

Having numerous features at your fingertips can be exciting, but try limiting it to only those you need. Otherwise, it’ll slow your system down and make it harder to access the tools you need. 

If your system isn’t easy to implement, your team members might get frustrated and give up, deeming your system unusable and an expensive failure. A CRM that’s too confusing to navigate wastes your customers’ time and your team’s time. 

No matter how straightforward your CRM may be, you will most likely run into an issue at some point, so make sure your system comes with accessible customer service, too!

Pick a CRM that integrates with all your software

This ties in with straightforward navigation. Your employees won’t want to navigate multiple software programs, each with its unique user interface. Every piece of information stored across all your platforms should be stored in one program: your CRM.

This gives you quick access to specific customers’ information. So, for instance, if a sales associate needs to follow up with a prospect leaning toward purchasing a product, they won’t have to search across all your software to find a phone number or email address. Instead, their contact information will be just a couple of clicks away in your CRM.

When you don’t waste time navigating multiple software platforms, you can focus more on gaining and keeping customers. Much like businesses, nonprofits rely on customer retention. So take a note from nonprofits, and don’t let this critical strategy fall through the cracks.

Use data import to avoid duplicate information.

When you import your data, you shouldn’t have to delete multiple entries. Instead, your CRM should automatically merge identical entries and tidy up your data imported from all your different platforms, so your team can go on about their day without having to think twice about it.

You may not think the same information would be anything more than just annoying to look at, but it certainly is. Multiple entries for the same person mean that emails or texts will be doubled and maybe tripled when they’re on one of your mailing lists! 

Filling up their inboxes might drive them away if the issue is left unresolved. All the time you’ve spent acquiring and retaining customers will go to waste.

Segment your contacts for quick access

When you need to introduce a new product relative to a specific group of people, you’ll find it much easier if you’ve segmented your customers within your CRM. Contact segmentation allows you to organize your data insightfully. 

Some systems build live profiles for every one of your contacts. These profiles include their demographics — like their employer, their hometown, age, and preferential data — like how they prefer to be contacted. 

When you gather this information, you can separate your customers into specific groups, such as:

• How they were acquired, like through social media or in person.
• The total amount they’ve invested in your business to identify your significant customers.
• Their interests, so you know what encourages them to invest in your business.

Segmentation sets you up for successful sales asks because you can leverage the information in your database to personalize your outreach. That way, you’re less likely to be shut down after spending time creating general requests that aren’t tailored to anyone specifically.

Implement marketing automation

Communication with customers eats up a significant portion of a business’s time unless you get creative with your approach. For example, after you’ve segmented your customers, you can customize your outreach to appeal to specific groups of people. This is a vital factor to consider when forming your marketing strategy because not everyone responds to one communication approach. 

Marketing automation allows you to strategically target your audience to reach individuals who are likely to respond positively to whatever you need. 

Automation starts with primary email blasting, like a weekly (or monthly) newsletter to your entire base of customers. These mass emails are designed from templates and feature clear paths for readers to follow, like a CTA button that says ‘Purchase Now’ and reroutes them to your product page.

You’ll save time and money if you find a CRM that comes with a marketing automation filter or can easily integrate with one. Your communication will be more personal, even though you might be sending emails to groups of people with commonalities.

When it comes to marketing, businesses can note nonprofits, which rely heavily on external support. For more helpful tips on revamping your marketing strategy, visit Salsa’s strategy guide.

Integrate mobile

The traditional marketing method has moved on and has leveraged a range of technologies that are enabling functions. Therefore, the salespeople in the field using PDAs, Smartphones are brought into the loop wherein the real-time data access is managed through CRM. 

This is pocket-friendly compared to the employee being tracked sharing data from customer sites that make CRM integrated systems approach a hit in the sales circuit. The new addition in the existing CRM module will help track the employees, transact, authenticate, report, therefore providing your firm with an edge over the competitors.

Integrate with back-office

So after the front-end integration of CRM with mobile, the next move should be to digitalize all transactions and account information not only on desktops but also on smartphones and tablets to access quotes, sales, orders, and invoices to be authorized on a real-time basis. 

The integration of the front end with the back end helps manage the transactions that are information and specific to that module. The front and back end integration helps CRM to integrate the functions digitally and help the parties and actors be in sync on real-time data transaction and access.

Customize the CRM to your liking and hire a CRM developer

Focus on Force is the ideal preparation for your Salesforce Certification. I’ve spent eight years working with the Salesforce platform in various roles (including business analyst, project manager, consultant, solutions designer, and solutions architect), and worked my way through 10 certifications in order to move up the career ladder. 

Salesforce Certifications are Tough!

Which is exactly as it should be: they actually mean something to the real world, and you’ll bring tons of value to the company or clients when you pass the exam. As a result, having a Salesforce Certification (or many) under your belt carries a considerable salary premium. 

By setting yourself apart from your uncertified peers and becoming extremely well acquainted with the platform, you’re able to benefit from new job opportunities, promotions within existing jobs, and instant credibility. 

We offer the following Salesforce Certifications

1. Salesforce Administrator Certification Study Guide
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8. Salesforce Javascript Dev 1 Practice Exams
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11. Salesforce Data Architecture And Management Designer Practice Exams

Applications with the role-based interface:

The importance of different user groups within and outside of the organization clubbed under one application interface is about segregating what these groups do. It also reflects the process-based systems approach to task completion, and through an online mode, it is easier. 

The edge of managing the CRM rests on creating role-based interfaces that can cut across functions and departments. The role-based interface gels quickly when the projects are enormous, and teams need diverse skills to reach complex goals.

Share via social media:

The option to share problems, achievements, and needs can foster better results through customer relationship management. In addition, it can lead to sharing of ideas, solutions, or even crowdsourcing for a particular project in the organization. 

The ability to share in social media will help the employees to seek the crowdsourcing function, which will enable the power to resolve problems within the firm and even beyond (involving stakeholders). The power of social media helps to seek more options within and the best resolution through the

Expand intranet:

The scalability function should foster two-way communication within the office, an interoffice collaboration between multiple users across different locations on a real-time basis. 

This will help contribute to a given task or problem, enabling quicker decision-making and fail-safe solutions. In addition, the more giant loop of involving the stakeholders will help provide more transparent visibility into the system. This enables the stakeholders to plan to deploy lean, right time, and right place solutions.

Digitalize

The potent weapon smartphone engaged in aligning operations, HR attendance, retrieve documents, capture site videos, customer signature are innovative ways in which the networking dynamics of people in groups as per roles will shape the evolving CRM. 

The physical processes in the company systems are not always mapped into IT systems, but to create capabilities in doing so makes the importance of each process add value to the whole process. So business mapping and adding it to the IT module will help assess how the systems can gauge the time, effort, and money factor into it.

The above propositions are already straightforward in varied CRM elements in large organizations. However, the snapshot of these evolving features enables harnessing employee and their individual and team-based productivity to the maximum. 

There is a clear shift of companies providing laptops with preinstalled ERP like Skyward ERP; SAP is gradually issuing smartphone devices with CRM apps embedded. Using advanced intelligent systems like the SAS integrated into CRM will help firms of the global scale of operations efficiently segregate the data of customers, employees, and transactions and productivity.

When we speak about CRM capability function, it cuts across the customer-centric approach to closely integrate employees. The demand of the situation and resources engaged is measured through productivity. So the CRM that is enabling to map the customer data along with the employee activities mapping leads to the holistic goal of CRM. 

Productivity is about giving employees the edge in accessing the information on the move; managing, controlling, and updating contacts; tasks, authenticating, and sending auto-generated reports. This makes a big difference in organizations harnessing the employees across locations and engaging them on a real-time basis to keep productivity high. So if you adopt mobile CRM, you know for sure that apart from customers, it will increase your employee productivity at all levels.

Raise the bar of performance with Task Automation

Every enterprise uses a CRM system in some of the other forms. If it is mainly dependent on humans or driven by manual actions, you may expect some errors, missing out on details, or skipping a particular work order. Automating tasks like sending emails to customers, recurring commissions, aligning schedules, dispatching jobs as per the skills, location, and availability, timely alerts, etc., can be achieved using cloud CRM. 

This saves a considerable amount of time which is another case that may be wasted in administration with manual efforts. Your employees can utilize this free time to handle more calls, complete more work and increase their performance ratio. This also allows tracking employees’ work and reminding them of pending work & staying on their toes.

Be ahead of the curve with Social CRM.

Nucleus Research concludes that sales representatives witnessed a rise of 26.4% in productivity with the integration of social networks and mobile access to CRM applications. Who wouldn’t like to increase their productivity with a comparatively minimum investment? A cloud CRM solution is capable of meeting the demands of a modern customer from the connected generation. Social CRM has fascinated businesses as a platform to connect with their prospects, log in their requests, and keep an eye on new opportunities. Cloud CRM systems help to track the mentions, record them in your database directly and utilize them.

Go the extra mile with a Personalized Mobile CRM solution.

The popularity of mobile is evident and a known fact. Nobody can deny that mobile and its growing usage have positively impacted every kind of business. Personalization is the king! Providing personalized applications to your customers is simply one of the best ways to promote and grow your business. Further, Mobile access of CRM systems to the managers and representatives has accelerated the work ratio drastically. Cloud CRM extended to be available on mobile helps the employees to receive their tasks, update the details and respond to the customers instantly without depending on a specific device or location premises.

Let the right person hold the fort.

What happens if you ask a car mechanic to repair an AC or expect a financial accountant to code a programming language? It would just be a waste of time, money, and effort. Moreover, it will result in customer frustration for whose satisfaction the work is being done. 

To avoid such situations, CRM systems have business intelligence to route the work to the right person. This decision is based on the customer’s request, past interactions, employee’s area of expertise, and availability. As a result, achieve a high rate of first-time fix ratio, more chances of sales conversion, and more calls in a day with the quick resolution of the problem.

Hit the nail on the head with reports!

Predictive analytics and reports can do wonders! However, if you manage a business, you must have experienced the pain to decide and plan for future improvements. It involves a lot of time to understand what has been done, what is going on, and what should be next. To add to it, it consists of a degree of risk to decide the future roadmap. 

Allowing your cloud CRM to customize and auto-generate reports can save hundreds of hours yearly. Since all the chunks of information are collected in a centralized manner, it is easy to get precise statistics through different in-depth reports and dashboards. You gain a clear understanding of market trends, customer ratings, and workforce performance to take corrective decisions saving costs and time.

Be in the driver’s seat & Integrate it all.

Once in place, cloud CRM can be the top way to increase revenue by integrating every business process unified. A well-implemented CRM system helps all the departments of an enterprise to collaborate and synchronize data. 

A cloud CRM system with the ability to integrate seamlessly into all the applications used by the enterprise streamlines the entire business giving scope to achieve every goal. The intelligent integration removes all barriers to communication and functioning of departments, be it sales, marketing, accounting, IT, or customer support. Integrate it to benefit from it is the rule!

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.